Rhonchi

Role model beats odds every year: South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Linda Bowman recently celebrated her 45th birthday. Five-year-old Kristy Lamb hopes to eventually celebrate hers, too.

They are both fighting cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that causes their bodies to produce thick mucus that clogs their lungs. Half of people with the disease live until age 32; the rest die before that age.

But Bowman, of Boca Raton, beats statistics. That’s why she’s a role model for Kristy, of Coral Springs, and other young cystic fibrosis patients hoping to see their futures.

More at http://www.cff.org/home/ 

Man Coughs Up Nail 35 Years After Accident
His family rushing him to the hospital with a 105-degree temperature. There, doctors found the culprit, a small nail that had dropped down inside Hart’s body cavity and nestled inside his ribcage.

Doses of penicillin helped Hart heal, but since removing the metal would require major surgery and doctors suspected the nail would seal itself off in Hart’s body, the foreign object was forgotten for years.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Hart said.

Years later, the nail turned up again on a doctor’s x-ray, but again, the unobtrusive item was left alone.

Then, three weeks ago, an internal camera captured an image of the nail during a routine doctor’s office visit. But it wasn’t in Hart’s ribcage area as he’d always thought — the object was actually in Hart’s lung. As Hart and his doctors made plans to remove the nail once and for all, natural physiology took over.

Apparently the mucociliary blanket is much tougher than I was led to believe.

Hospital in Northern California needs weekend coverage for possible strike!!

• The facility needs coverage for one weekend only!!  February 23rd and 24th
• We will pay for flight and hotel
• You will do orientation on Friday evening the 22nd.
• You will be working 2 twelve hour shifts
• You will be compensated $1000 for working the 24 hours on the weekend.
• If you work the graveyard shift you will be compsated an additional $150
• You MUST have a current California license.
• If you would like to know more, please contact me at (866) 953-0011 or email me at ksmith [at] platinumselect.org

Centre Daily Times | 02/13/2006 | Pulmonary rehab brings hope to sufferers of lung disease
Ever increasing de-conditioning results in more shortness of breath, and so the vicious cycle continues. A comprehensive pulmonary rehabilitation program provides an educational forum about COPD, as well as supervised exercise under the watchful eye of a respiratory therapist and psychosocial support. This intervention has been shown to reduce the sense of breathlessness described by COPD patients, thus allowing them to increase their activity level.

Pulmonary rehabilitation has been shown to reduce the number of hospitalizations associated with exacerbation. It probably does not prolong the lives of patients with COPD, but it certainly improves their quality of life.

Kind of a scary article:

Misdiagnosis of Pulmonary Embolism Found Frequent and Harmful – CME Teaching Brief – MedPage Today

Despite evidence-based guidelines, diagnostic mismanagement of a suspected pulmonary embolism is common and harmful, according to French researchers.
Two large studies reported in the Feb. 7 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine alerted physicians to a serious diagnostic problem involving a suspected pulmonary embolism and suggested a method of providing less subjective diagnoses for these patients.

An ad on the Super Bowl for asthmacontrol.com : watch it here:Jerome Bettis: Asthma Control Test – Google Video
Informaton about this ads: Produced by Advair for GlaxoSmithKline.

Asthma doesn’t stop The Bus, and it doesn’t have to stop you. Take the Asthma Control Test (TM) and share your results with your doctor. Take the Asthma Control Test and know your asthma score. The American Lung Association supports the Asthma Control Test and wants everyone 12 years of age and older with asthma to take it, no matter how well controlled you think your asthma is. This commercial aired during the 2006 Super Bowl.

What happens if you have mass casualties who all need mechanical ventilation? Sounds like a mess to me, but folks are thinking hard about the allocation of ventilation technologies in such an event. Let’s hope we don’t need to implement it.
Concept of Operations for Triage of Mechanical Ventilation in an Epidemic — Hick and O’Laughlin, 10.1197/j.aem.2005.07.037 — Academic Emergency Medicine

The recent outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome and the growing potential of an influenza pandemic force us to consider the fact that despite great advances in critical care medicine, we lack the capacity to provide intensive care to the large number of patients that may be generated in an epidemic or multisite bioterrorism event. Because many epidemic and bioterrorist agent illnesses involve respiratory failure, mechanical ventilation is a frequently required intervention but one that is in limited supply. In advance of such an event, we must develop triage criteria that depend on clinical indicators of survivability and resource utilization to allocate scarce health care resources to those who are most likely to benefit. These criteria must be tiered, flexible, and implemented regionally, rather than institutionally, with the backing of public health agencies and relief of liability. This report provides a sample concept of operations for triage of mechanical ventilation in epidemic situations and discusses some of the ethical principles and pitfalls of such systems.

Read the whole thing.

Most WTC Health Registry Enrollees Reported New or Worsened Respiratory Symptoms After 9/11/01

Most enrollees in the World Trade Center Health Registry reported having one or more respiratory problems that either began or got worse in the weeks and months after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City, according to the latest quarterly report issued today by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH).

This month, Kids Discover covers “Lungs!”

Sample text:

“They’re squishy like sponges and stretchy like balloons. You use them every day – and night, too – no matter what you’re doing. And, most likely, you never even think about them. They’re you’re lungs – those elastic bags with millions of tiny air pouches inside. All day long, those sacs in your chest fill and empty with the breath that feeds your body the oxygen it needs to stay alive. But, breathing isn’t the only way these pouches help you be you.”

via missewon

If I’d have had rhonchi.com up and running last year I’d have posted this here too:

ArtLung Blog : Archives : » Bronchoscope, 1993

At UVa I was one of the Respiratory Therapists on the bronchoscopy team. Basically we assisted on bronchoscopies for patients who needed to have their lungs looked at with fiber-optics. I assisted on some odd ones. I remember one very critically ill patient, their circulation was supported heavily with vasopressors and I think he was an ARDS on top of preexisting pulmonary fibrosis—the inside of their lungs seemed to be filled up with black tar. Really terrible. I worked the night shift at UVa, so there were no “day in day out” bronchoscopies, it was usually people who were very sick. The Pulmonologists were all really cool, and it was fun to be in that assist role. They want saline, you have the saline ready. We maintained the bronch cart and assured we were ready for anything. It was actually quite fun, despite the seriousness of the job.